Farewell Fat Clothes

While I'm on vacation next month, I'll be illegally "subletting" my apartment to a Brazilian woman, and my mother reminded me that I'd need to do something about my piggy corners before then. A piggy-cornerer herself, she suggested that I clean out a closet and throw the piggy stuff into the newly-created space. So I finally got around to bagging up all the clothes that no longer fit, sizes 14-22. Oh, did I mention I once dipped my toe in the morbidly obese pool? Well, 78 lbs smaller, it's time to say farewell to the fat clothes - the ones I relatively liked and was hoarding in case I yo-yo'd back up to Size Lardass. And to help make sure I'd never need them again, I walked 15 lbs of donations 1.5 miles to a Housing Works thrift shop on the Upper Westside.

It was the wrong place to take my gently used size 18s. If the handles of my plastic bags hadn't been cutting into my moneymakers (a.k.a. hands - remember, I'm a massage therapist) for the past half hour, I'd have brought them back home and tried a church. What was so wrong about it? Well, my stuff came from stores like JC Penney and Old Navy, and it was larger than a size 10. This thrift store's demographic was rather obviously the fashionably fit under-40 crowd looking for a deal on mid-range designer gear. I only hope that they're the kind of place that sends its rejects to Goodwill, whose automated phone system put me on neverending hold.

So I take away a lesson about research and impulse. As admirable as my intentions were (in the past, all clothing went guiltily in the trash), I caused them some degree of hassle by giving them things they couldn't use. Had I clicked around their website a bit more, I'd probably have figured that out. But no, me and my tunnel vision just saw a place that was open and accepting donations right now, and off I went in pursuit of a selfish feelgood. There, I've rapped my own knuckles.